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How important is money in politics? Arguably a bigger portion of a presidential candidate's time is spent wooing donors than voters. Incumbents use it to scare away challengers. Now a Silicon Valley startup says campaign contributions are one of the best ways to identify just how conservative or liberal a politician is, or a company's leaders, or even a city.
Crowdpac, a nonpartisan group, has created an algorithm tracking more than 100 million campaign contributions on the federal and state level since 2002 and giving a partisan score to each transaction. Normally, the group's number crunchers use the data to quantify candidates, but just for the fun of it, they recently released a search engine that allows people to find the political score for their hometown, as long as that town had at least 6,000 residents and 10 campaign contributors.
And as a shock to no one in Utah, just about every city here is conservative. Crowdpac analyzed 71 cities in the Beehive State and found only two on the liberal end of the scale. Predictably, they are Salt Lake City (0.16L) and Park City (0.71L). The scale goes up to 10.
Eagle Mountain, with a score of 7.54C, was not only the most conservative Utah city in this study, but also the 10th most conservative in the nation.
Other top-level conservative cities included Hooper (6.67C), Brigham City (6.54C) and Roosevelt (6.38C).
A pattern emerges in the data. Smaller cities tended to be on the extremes. The most conservative cities in America are places you have likely never heard of, such as Hereford and Monahans, two small cities in West Texas, or Appling, Ga. The liberal top 10 are also smaller cities, with Vashon Island, Wash., topping the list, followed by Ridgefield Park, N.J., and Rosendale, N.Y.
Mason Harrison, Crowdpac's political director and a former campaign aide to Mitt Romney, said size matters because smaller cities tend to have more like-minded residents than bigger metropolitan areas.
So Provo, with a conservative score of 4.99C is pretty far to the right, but falls well behind places such as Cedar Hills (6.10C) or American Fork (6.36C).
What Harrison likes about looking at this data is that it shows "the kind of candidates that people in your area give to, not just the party they give to."
Eagle Mountain's score looks awfully close to that of Rep. Mia Love, R-Utah, who represents that area. She receives a 7.4C. No city in the state, however, is as conservative as Sen. Mike Lee, who gets a sky-high 9.4C.
The least conservative, using campaign contribution data, is Rep. Rob Bishop, who also happens to be the Utah congressman who raises the least amount of money for his re-election campaigns. His score of 5.8C means he is as conservative as Alpine, Mapleton or Tremonton, the latter of which happens to be close to his hometown of Brigham City.
Harrison said his colleagues saw this as a fun way to spark conversations as people went home for the holidays to talk to their "Donald Trump-supporting uncle or the Bernie Sanders-backing aunt."
"With the holidays," he said, "we wanted something a little more lighthearted to engage in."
Brigham Young University political scientist Adam Brown sees this analysis as good conversation fodder, and, while the general trends may be right, he said he wouldn't take any ranking of the cities too seriously. That's because if it takes only 10 donors to make the list, some of the smaller Utah towns have their partisanship ranked by a tiny fraction of residents.
"The fewer people you have donating from a particular city," he said, "the more likely it is to come up as extreme."
And to get counted, a person has to have given at least $200 to a candidate or political group. But Crowdpac would argue those people are among the most politically engaged in the nation. They put their money where there politics are, and, when aggregated, we can get a sense of just how conservative or liberal a place has become.